


We Have Heard On High

by Merlin Missy (mtgat)



Category: The End is the Beginning - Two Steps From Hell (Song)
Genre: First Contact, Gen, POV Child, Space Exploration, War
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-05-31
Updated: 2018-05-31
Packaged: 2019-05-16 08:42:58
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,352
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14808048
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mtgat/pseuds/Merlin%20Missy
Summary: The colony ship carrying Marta and her family arrives at the new planet they will call home. They aren't alone.





	We Have Heard On High

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Minutia_R](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Minutia_R/gifts).



> The force of fallen light  
> Descended and flamed too bright  
> A lost and fallen race  
> The science turned from grace  
> The war proceeds the rest  
> The song of the dancing dead  
> And time squared to lapse  
> And forgets when time began  
> The world must come to an end  
> The dark of space will bend.

The planet grew larger in the viewscreen as the colony world ambled its long approach towards their new home. Marta took her turn peering at the grey-green-blue ball. The scientists who'd first charted this distant world had bickered over names, ultimately leaving the final choice to the new colonists: Persephone or Athena.

"We'll choose wisdom," Marta's mother said, casting her ballot with the other adults after they woke from their four hundred year slumber. Marta thought the name Persephone was prettier, but she nodded and accepted the choice when wisdom ruled the day.

"Hello, Athena," she said, resisting the impulse to wave.

* * *

The colony ship orbited the planet in a wide ellipse. This helped the engines, Mother said, and as she was one of the engineers who knew about this sort of thing, Marta believed her. As they passed close, the minihovers would descend with machinery and workers to begin constructing the basic area for the colony. They would clear out a great space for the ship to descend and begin its conversion into the center of their new city, first home for the five thousand souls aboard.

After the first descent, Mother worked late in the ship's evening, waiting for the signal from the early step workers. She came into the tiny family pod after Marta and her brothers had been put to bed. Father's voice woke her: "That's not possible."

"It shouldn't be possible," Mother corrected. "All our previous scans said the planet was uninhabited by any sapient species. Nothing showed up on our scans from the past two days. But there are humans here, and they speak our language perfectly."

"Maybe they colonized before we got here. Another ship from Earth. It's the only explanation."

Mother shrugged. "It's the most logical explanation. We took a very long time to arrive here. If the technology improved while we slept, they could have arrived within a few years or even months. But there's no sign of civilization that we can see. They came, and they settled, and they forgot." She sighed. "Ardina said they look like angels."

"They could be carrying any number of pathogens we don't know about yet. I want to go with the next descent." Father was a physician.

"We can't risk you."

"We can't risk bringing the workers back up until we know for sure. Better to risk one person than five thousand." Father glanced at Marta and her brothers. Marta shut her eyes, knowing he'd seen her awake.

There was more, but they dropped their voices to whispers Marta couldn't hear, and finally she fell asleep dreaming of strange angels.

* * *

Father went with the next descent crew, only him and two volunteers to fly the minihover. Mother told Marta not to worry, that he would stay on planet to help them set up their new home.

"What about the angels?" Marta asked, but Mother hushed her and said she had to work.

* * *

The colonists descended in the great ship itself three months after their arrival at Athena. Marta was most excited about seeing Father again. The thrill of a new planet had lost its charms amid the slow, dull orbit. Her brothers were ready to play outside again. Tomas swore he couldn't remember what grass felt like under his feet.

"Be careful around this grass," Mother warned him. "They've tested the plants and the soil, but we could still find nasty surprises. You might be allergic."

Allergies and worse were the reasons given for all the vaccinations they were given while waiting for the word that all was safe. "It will keep you safe," said the physician who wasn't Father while Marta rubbed her arm.

Her stomach swooped and dipped as they dropped through the clouds, gravity switching over from the artificial ship's gravity to the planet's own pull midway. Had everyone not been strapped in and seated, they would have fallen. Marta sat between Tomas and Albin, wishing she could watch the sky as it cleared from black to grey to blue, but she could see nothing from this deep inside the ship. The colonists took hours to disembark, and it was nightfall by the time Marta's family set foot outside and breathed in fresh air for the first time in four hundred years.

Albin giggled and ran, even though Mother said to stop, and chased after him, but he was running up to where Father waited, his face all covered with a beard now. Mother embraced him, and with a quick word to the children, left them in his care as she returned to the ship. The engineers had an enormous task ahead of them in converting the ship from spaceworthy into land-dwelling.

Marta took her turn hugging Father, breathing in the odd smell of this planet on his clothes and in his hair. Earth's smell was far behind them. Her eyes pricked with tears like a baby thinking about it. She pushed the thought away. She asked Father, "Where are the angels? Are they here? Mother won't tell us."

Father touched her shoulders and gave her a sad smile. "There aren't any angels, honey."

"That's why you came down early," she said. She'd wanted to meet an angel. They'd always sounded nice.

He shook his head. "Those were humans, and they died. I'm sorry."

* * *

As the school set up, and Marta and Tomas grumbled their way through lessons, they learned that the history of Athena would begin with sorrow. The new colonists hadn't been infected by the people living here, but they must have brought some contagion with them that had killed their new friends less than a week after they said hello for the first time.

"They were human," said the teacher, "whatever rumor you might have heard aboard the ship. Dr. Lee autopsied them, and we've preserved them for further study."

Hands shot up, and Marta felt a few eyes on her and Tomas. "Why didn't we know they were here?"

"The research team is still working on that."

"Shouldn't we bury them?" asked one of the other children.

"We have to know they're not dangerous," the teacher said, and moved them on to the next lesson. The angels hadn't been dangerous, Marta knew. The colonists had been dangerous to them.

* * *

Marta met her first angel two years to the day after she'd arrived on Athena. She'd walked off from the anniversary celebration, bored and out of sorts, and wandered deep into the groves of trees at the far confines of the main colony until she couldn't hear the music behind her.

The angel sat on a tipped-over tree, leaning back comfortably. They weren't really trees, she knew, but huge ferns grown to scrape the skies, and this wasn't really an angel.

"Hi," she said, staying back. If she was infectious, she didn't want to accidentally kill this one, too.

"Hi," said the angel.

"I thought all of you were gone. Father said you all died."

"My father said some of our people were killed when they went to see the angels coming from the sky. We've stayed away."

She stayed back, but ventured a baby step closer. "Are you from Earth?"

"Of course. Where are you from?"

"Earth. We traveled four hundred years to get here from there."

"From where?"

"From Earth, silly."

"We're on Earth, silly." The angel had a funny way of talking, mocking her a little but not in a mean way like the kids from school did sometimes. Marta wondered if their word for Athena was also Earth.

"We don't mean you any harm," she said. "The angels got sick and died."

"But you're here. You're not sick." The angel had used the word 'angel' to describe the colonists, Marta remembered. It was all very strange.

"I think the adults would like to talk to you. We didn't mean to take your home from you." Except they hadn't stopped, either. They had met angels, and those had died, and Father never said a word about looking for more.

"You haven't. You won't be here long. I wanted to come take a look. I've never seen an angel before." The angel blinked at her with wide brown eyes much like her own.

She didn't like the sound of that. "We're staying."

The angel shrugged, as if the matter wasn't very important. "It was nice meeting you." It turned and walked away from her, and Marta, forgetting herself, ran after.

"Wait!"

The angel turned, almost bored. Marta stopped instantly, remembering. She could kill the angel with her germs. "I have to go back. It will start soon."

"What will?"

Overhead, Marta heard the sound of thick, busy wings suddenly filling the air over the ferns with a huge noise. She hadn't been able to hear the music back at the colony, but now she heard the screams.

When she looked, the angel had gone.

* * *

The war began that night. The colonists had spread out to fabricated homes. Now they huddled inside the ships for safety. The angels came at night, fire blazing before them from no visible weapons. Houses burned. The newly tilled fields scorched. By day, they could clean and gather, and the quickly-drafted army took their own weapons to the place they thought was the village of their attackers.

"They don't live in houses," Mother said. "As far as we can tell, they have rude dwellings in between the trees."

"The trees that we cut down?" Tomas asked, but no one answered him.

Father came home after his day in the infirmary treating burns, his face drawn into a horror. He whispered to Mother than the angels they'd dissected and preserved had come alive inside their tanks, beating against the plexiglass walls, screaming to get out, their bodied writhing in some obscene dance within the alcohol.

"What did you do?" Mother asked, her own voice another whisper. Marta had to strain to hear anything at all.

"We burned them. It was the only way to be sure."

The raids at night intensified, and by day, more and more of the colony's adults went to fight while the angels slept or hid. The colony's leaders announced their kills proudly, reassuring the colonists of their safety, and that soon they would be free of the alien threat. The alien threat did not stop.

Mother and Father spoke at night, as the fires burned around their refuge ship, and now Mother was busy during the day, not with fighting, but with fitting the ship.

"We can change our location to another territory," she said. "Our scout ships think the next continent will be a better place."

Father said, "We're just going to abandon the farms? We've built our home here."

"This isn't home."

* * *

They lifted off during the day, the ship groaning as it slowly pulled up from the ground, something it had never been designed to do once it had set down. Planetary gravity stayed on, shifting and rocking them as they made their way from the colony where they believed they would stay forever into a new land across the turgid oceans.

The ship didn't have time to hover as a new space was cleared by a team. They set down on a wide, open plain, and as the colony ship landed heavily, Marta knew it was for the last time. They would never convince it to take off again. This was home.

"This will be fine," Father said, holding Albin's hand as they slowly made their way off the ship. "The angels lived in the trees, and we saw no sign of life on this continent. We'll be safe and happy here."

* * *

They forgot.

Marta grew up, learned to farm, married a wife she loved dearly, raised four children, taught them the stories she remembered of Earth, taught her grandchildren how to farm Athena's soil, and died one night with her great-granddaughter on her lap, reading a story until they both fell asleep. The angels became history, became folk tale, became amusing anecdote of what the old timers used to believe.

Earth became a story. All the past became stories.

The asteroid strike three hundred years after the foundation of the colony merely devastated the planet rather than obliterating it. The survivors lost the old colony ship, but it had faded to a relic by then, and the survivors' grandchildren didn't know why it had been important in the first place. Their straggling group wandered for generations far away from the city of their ancestors and into the protection of the extant old forests halfway across the continent. Great ferns reached towards the mysterious stars.

The ferns offered protection, and they offered food. The people, for they called themselves 'the people,' told themselves stories that once they could place food into the ground and it would grow out of the ground, but this was a silly story, like the story of the angels and the Great Burning. Food came from the sap of the trees. It filled their bellies and kept them strong.

* * *

The woman's name was Marta, and she was named for her grandmother, who was named for an aunt, whose name stretched back before the asteroid, but it was her name now. Her task was to travel to the edge of the forest and examine the stars for messages. Good omens and bad, they were hers to deduce and to bring back to the people.

Tonight, the stars were clear. One was new, brighter than she remembered, and as she watched, it grew and grew until it showed itself to be a great silver creature. Filled with excited terror, Marta stayed and watched this, the most astonishing omen of her life.

The side of the silver creature split open. Inside were people, people like her, people like the people. Only they were strange, speaking words that she understood, yet utterly unlike her.

Marta remembered a story she learned at her grandmother's knee, told in the shade of the tallest fern in the forest.

"Angels," she said to herself, and she laughed, and she stepped out of the shadow of the forest to greet them.


End file.
